Penniless and nervous, the student occupies a fifth floor room
in a flophouse, where he hears violin music raging in inchoate,
beautiful strains night after night.
"…I heard Zann every night, and although he kept me awake,
I was haunted by the weirdness of his music. Knowing little
of the art myself, I was yet certain that none of his harmonies
had any relation to music I had heard before; and concluded
that he was a composer of highly original genius."
Upon meeting his neighbor, an ancient, satyr-faced German
mute who writes him notes in "execrable French", the narrator
comes to understand that the musician inhabits two musical
worlds, one, of the well-known music he plays for his listener,
and that of his private music, the strange harmonies, unintended for other ears, which the narrator overhears. It is these
sounds of a private musical language that the narrator seeks
to hear again, but the old man does not wish it. He is possessed by some strange fear, of person, place or thing we are
not told, but by the end of the story, the already apprehensive
narrator has tasted the abyss over which Erich Zann lives.
The Music of Erich Zann envelops the reader in the narrator's
state of mind, and points to the solitary heart of darkness
which underlies of the ferment of all creative power. The story
suggests, through the fact that it is written at all, that the
narrator has passed through this labyrinth into the light of
creation achieved. Lisa Zeiger (continue for story....)
HYLAND
